New Moon in Pisces | March 17, 20186:11am PST | 26 degrees

Around dawn on Saturday morning, a New Moon in Pisces will occur. Pisces is the transcendent zone of the zodiac. It harbors the connective tissue between the Body and the Spirit, that subtle thing we call the Soul. It is the place where from the body, we humans converse with the cosmos, and with consciousness itself.

The Sun and the Moon, Sol and Luna: our identity and our souls’ yearning. The two meet in Pisces at 6:11am on March 17, and their job at this time is to bring up the most potent themes of our desire to identify ourselves through connection to Beings other than the self. There is a distinctly primordial quality to this Moon: it dives into the essential, erotic connection between all people and all things. This is such a large theme, it brings something of the sea monster out in us, with its awesome and horrific beauty, consuming creatures simply to remind them how little it matters.

Thalassa, Greek primordial sea-goddess | sourced via Pinterest

Remember that connection is a de facto reality. We don't choose to be connected, we just are. Our lives are defined by what we choose to do with this connection, and through what actions we access it. We can fall in love with other humans, fall in love with our work, ethereal entities, with existence itself, or all of the above and much more. The point of this lunation is to remember that the connective tissue exists, and to empty ourselves enough to work with it.

This New Moon occurs tightly conjunct the asteroid Chiron, the archetypal Wounded Healer. He brings up our tenderness, our personal shortcomings, and, in perfect lockstep, prods us beyond them. All of the baggage that weighs us down to earth is present with this New Moon, and our job is to transcend it, to do the work of becoming light enough to connect in the face of heaviness.

Mars, brutal warrior, is in for this ride, throwing wrenches via a square into these earthly cisterns that contain our consciousness. And just a few hours after the New Moon, Mars enters Capricorn, where he takes on the dark, chthonic tone of Saturn and Pluto’s transits through the sign of the horny goat. Moreover, the mutineer Uranus trines Mars; Venus and Mercury recently met in rough-and-tumble Aries; and Mercury will plunge into his underworld retrograde journey on March 22, the day after the Vernal Equinox.

This creates the circumstance of temptation. To resist our vulnerability and play tough. To identify with our hard lines and aggression, to hunt for connection for our own gratuitous pleasure. And with good reason: traversing the underworld is a precarious act. Communications and circumstantial arrangements go awry during Mercury Retrograde to remind us that the ego must be dismantled. Things don’t always go our way because we have to remember that the ego is a slipshod armor. It is a flimsy film of protection. Best not hedge our bets on it.

Opening the ego to this process of disassembly is, generally, the work of love. It isn’t an easy ride. But as the old saying goes, “Smooth seas make bad sailors.” By choosing the mysterious sea of love despite its threats to the ego, we outstrip the binary code of self and other. We become more complex, gentle Beings, aware of the many interconnections that inform every isolated connection. Every act is informed by countless acts before it. We must approach one another with sensitivity to such histories.

As we open up to this New Moon, we’re being asked to empty ourselves for the more profound subtleties of love. To become as remarkably constellated and simultaneously empty as the impersonal sky. The revelation of love as a principle motivator in our lives promises creativity and soulful expression. The requirements are that we release the grip of attachment to outcome, and act, void of aspiration, from the humblest of places. The place of love. This is the mythic life-giving water. The soul, opened and connective.